


Things Dangerous to Come To

by Doyle



Category: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-27
Updated: 2014-06-27
Packaged: 2018-02-06 09:22:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1852825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Doyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"The thing with clues, my teacher says, is you really only need one good one."</i> Post-movie. Cheryl's good with mysteries, and she suspects she's not the only one in love with Walter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Dangerous to Come To

**Author's Note:**

  * For [youjik33](https://archiveofourown.org/users/youjik33/gifts).



“How nice to hear your voice. You owe me four pages.” It could have just been Cheryl’s imagination, but Sylvie sounded disappointed that she’d answered the phone. Maybe she’d been fantasizing all night about the shocking disappearance and/or murder of a bright young – Cheryl made a rueful face at Chips, and he sat up and thumped his tail against the kitchen floor at the attention – bright-ish young-ish woman in New York City, and the one intrepid writing coach who could crack the case.

“Sorry I skipped group. I left a message on the store’s machine, but...” But in the months she’d been going to class she’d never seen the phone, although she’d once heard one forlornly ringing behind a yellowing stack of thirty-year-old _Ellery Queen_ s. Sylvie must have excavated it just to check she was okay. “It’s so sweet of you to call, thank you.”

“My dear, you were missed. I adore every one of my writers, I do, but if I have to listen to one more unironic Hammett knockoff...”

Fifty bucks said somebody had misused ‘gunsel’ again. “I’ll be there next week,” she promised. “Extra pages. Deaths all over the place. I’ve actually written a lot; I’ve been inspired lately.”

“You mean you’ve been working lately. That’s all it is. Putting the hours in.”

“I did get some extra writing time the last few days.” In between emailing out her resume and calling temp agencies, she'd spent her week murdering fictional characters who might or might not bear a strong coincidental resemblance to certain bearded corporate assholes. Whatever Sylvie said, inspiration played some part in the creative process. “But I had a date last night, and it clashed with the group but like you always say, if we don’t go out and live life we won’t have anything to write about.”

“Well, I say that with the expectation you’d manage to fit this living of life into the other one hundred sixty-six hours of the week,” Sylvie grumbled.

“Ah, but this was a one-night-only kind of thing. Unmissable. Community theater production of Grease.”

“Tell me more,” Sylvie said, and Cheryl could only assume that wasn’t an intentional reference because the only pop culture she’d ever mentioned was her co-author’s credit on a half dozen episodes of _Murder, She Wrote_.

“It was... a lot of fun, actually.” And she was a grown woman with a half-grown child and she was _not_ smiling foolishly at nothing in her empty kitchen because she’d suddenly thought about a cute guy. “Walter - the man I was with - his sister was playing Rizzo. She was good, too. I mean, she could have been terrible and it would’ve been worth it just to see Walter’s face when he realized he was about to introduce me to his sister and his mother on a first date, but she did the part justice.”

“And you like him? This Walter?”

She was a grown woman, and if she was smiling foolishly at nothing just a little bit, it was okay. Chips wouldn’t tell anyone. “I do. Yes. I do.”

“I hope he’s terribly handsome,” Sylvie said, and the sheer well-intentioned sincerity made her laugh.

“Maybe you can tell me,” she said. “You subscribe to Life, right?”

* * *

“It was the weirdest job offer I've ever gotten,” she told Walter later, as he walked her home from a lunch date that had gone on so long she was thinking about asking him to dinner. “I mean, it's amazing, it's something I think I could love doing and she's needed help in the store for a while. It's just that I got the feeling she thought she needed to keep an eye on me because I was creating an elaborate romantic fantasy about a magazine cover.”

“Which would be... ridiculous, of course, nobody would...” Walter cleared his throat. “I’m just glad she got her subscription copy. I thought my mom bought out the whole print run. She went home last night with every flyer they had left over for Grease.”

“I liked your mom,” Cheryl said, because it was true and because it probably broke another one of those stupid dating rules her sister swore by.

“She likes you too,” Walter said, and wrapped his hand around hers.

Cheryl made him stop at the newsstand two blocks from her house, partly to delay the moment when they'd reach her door and she'd have to decide whether or not to say goodbye, and partly because he was fun to tease. “Wait, wait, I want to check. No, there you still are. Your mom didn’t get them all yet.” The Walter on the cover stared at his sheet of negatives, glasses in his hand and oblivious to the camera. The one beside her reached right past his own picture and picked up National Geographic instead. The cover picture was a forest fire, frozen in time as it jumped a highway, firefighters beating back a retreat, shrouded in smoke.

“This is new,” Walter said. “This is one of Sean’s. He must have taken this a while ago.”

“Did he tell you about it?”

He shook his head, and she scanned the coverline again in case she’d missed a photographer credit. “Then how do you know it’s his?”

Walter frowned and took a moment to answer, as if this had never occurred to him before. “It’s... the way you’d recognize someone’s voice, I guess. I could have picked out one of his pictures way before I knew his voice, actually. I'd been working with his negatives four or five years before we spoke on the phone.”

Five years to talk on the phone and sixteen to meet in person; she almost made a dumb joke about the two of them making it to first base by the time they retired, and then she looked at the cover again, the picture Sean O'Connell had decided was important enough to put on two million magazines, and felt a little ashamed of herself. “I’m more about words than pictures,” she said instead. “I mean, I have some family pictures stuck up on the door of my refrigerator, but that’s the end of my adventures in photography. Kind of felt like a fraud at Life.”

“You liked the motto,” he said, and it made her smile that he'd remembered that. “It makes sense you’d be more about words, you being a writer.”

Nobody but Sylvie had called her a writer before, and Cheryl knew she’d meant it, but she meant it even for the unironic Hammett knockoffs. Sylvie had said _Is he handsome?_ and Cheryl had thought that a better question would have been _Is he good?_. And now she thought _yes_ , and _oh, yes_ and stepped forward and kissed Walter Mitty in the middle of the street.

It meant she crushed the magazine between them and Walter insisted on paying for it, but she liked to think it was worth it.

* * *

The day Phil had moved out she'd followed him from room to room, watching him empty his side of the closet and bisect their CD collection, tuning out the justification that was meant more for himself than her anyway and wishing she was the kind of person who could cry when she was angry. He carefully, showily, only took the things he'd bought himself, but when the front door closed and Rich came to her for a hug it felt like the house had been hollowed out.

And that hadn't been so long ago, not even a year, so she couldn't explain where all this _stuff_ had come from, but clearing enough of it out to make space for another person was kind of fun. Especially since Rich was spending the weekend with his dad and she and Walter – mostly her, she’d hold her hands up to this one - had decided that combining households required a lot of wine.

She'd dumped a bunch of magazines from beside the bed, but the last one was the National Geographic with the forest fire on the cover, and she smoothed out the crease and dropped it in the Keep pile. “You know, it really is a beautiful photo,” she told Walter. “And I like his latest one, the snow leopard. But I’ve got to go with Sean on this, that picture of you’s his best work.”

Walter refilled her glass and moved a pile of dog-eared John Dickson Carr paperbacks into Keep without having to ask, and she suddenly loved him very much.

“Sean's been a Pulitzer finalist three times,” he said. “The cover picture was - I still can't believe he did that. It was an honor. But I'm sure he doesn't think it's his best work.”

“Were you not listening to his telegram? _Quintessence of Life_ , by Sean O’Connell. That’s practically its title.”

He smiled at her. “How do you even remember that?”

“It stuck in my head. It’s a good word. I wanted to beat beard-guy over the head with a dictionary when he didn’t get it.” She gave up on emptying the dresser and sat down on the carpet, leaning back against the bed. She mouthed ‘quintessence’ to herself and enjoyed the shape of it, enjoyed the warmth against her shoulder when Walter joined her, too.

“I miss him,” Walter said quietly.

“The beard guy?” It took her a second. “You haven't spoken to him at all? Since...”

“No. No, I would've told you.”

Cheryl leaned her head against his shoulder. “I know you would. You should call him,” she said, and then remembered that Sean didn’t have a phone, that Walter had only found him once before by going to the end of the world. “You could write him. We tracked him down before. We’ll figure it out. One good clue, remember?”

“I remember.” He pressed a kiss against her temple. “I love you.”

“I love you.”

“Maybe someday,” he said. “Maybe when I figure out what I'd even write.”

She could have told him that it didn't work that way, that you had to work with the imperfect words because if you waited for perfect ones you'd wait forever, but he leaned in to kiss her and she suddenly forgot everything she knew. 

* * *

For the first time in a very long while, Walter was gone.

Later she’d ask, and he’d say “I was thinking about the ghost cat. The snow leopard, I mean. From the Nat Geo cover? I was imagining coming back to the house and finding it sitting on the steps, and Chips going crazy the way he does with that big dog in the park who you think is his nemesis.” And she’d try to imagine it herself and would concede that, okay, that would be a surprise.

Almost as big a surprise as finding Sean O’Connell waiting outside their front door.

Actually, he was at their neighbor’s door, bags of Mrs Neimann’s groceries in his arms and their owner talking his ear off while she fumbled with her keys. Sean was listening intently, nodding at the right places, and Cheryl didn’t recognize him right away. She had only ever seen him in a photograph and that was how she’d imagined him, camera in his hands, calm and solemn and monochrome. She would have taken him for some visiting Neimann nephew, but Walter took one look at him and vanished to wherever it was he went.

“Walter Mitty,” Sean said, his eyes lighting up, but when he got nothing back he glanced uncertainly at her and said, “and... Cheryl, right?”

“Melhoff,” she said. “Cheryl Melhoff. Yes. That's me.”

“Sean O'Connell,” he said, his hand out. It didn't surprise her at all that he had a strong, reassuring grip.

“I know,” she said, and Walter finally snapped back to himself.

“Sean,” he said - good start, she thought, but then he floundered again.

“Walter,” Mrs Neimann cooed, “this handsome young man was looking for you.”

“And now he's found him,” Cheryl said, as brightly as she could. “Let me help you with these groceries, Mrs N. Walter? _Walter_. Do you want to take Sean inside?” But even though she took her time, asking after children and grandchildren and Mrs N's ongoing feud with the city council, when she came back out the two of them were still awkwardly staring at one another on the street.

At least they were talking, now. “Finally remembered to pick up my Princeton mail,” Sean was saying. “There was a check waiting from Life. For number twenty-five. You found it?”

Walter nodded. “The wallet... my mom...”

Sean smiled, getting it. “I always liked your mom.”

“She likes you,” Walter said.

“She's the one who gave me your address. Tried calling a couple of days ago, but your number was disconnected. That was... weird. I think that must be the first time in ten years I haven’t had your number.”

“I moved,” Walter said quickly, “I moved in with Cheryl.” He looked helplessly at her, as if he needed some kind of assurance that yes, that happened, so she nodded. “And I lost my cell phone a couple of months ago and that number changed...”

“Oh. Because when I realized you’d found twenty-five and they’d put it on the cover, and then I couldn't get hold of you...” Sean hesitated, and then he said: “I thought maybe I embarrassed you. So I figured I'd drop by. Apologize.”

“No – Sean, no, you didn’t embarrass me.” _That day in the park, you weren’t boring me_ , he’d once told her, the exact same tone. “The cover was... it was amazing.”

“It was beautiful,” Cheryl said without thinking, and Sean beamed at her, sudden and startling and like she’d been part of the conversation all along.

“I thought so." He was looking at Walter, so much affection in his eyes that for a second she forgot he was practically a stranger, that the three of them had never been together like this in their lives.

Walter reached out and took her hand, and she squeezed his fingers and took a breath. “Sean, do you want to come inside?” she said. “It’s been, what, seventeen years? I think it’s time you two talked.”


End file.
